John Niedermeyer is a Brooklyn-based design manager and internets enthusiast at <a href="http://buzzfeed.com">BuzzFeed</a>. Previously, he was a digital designer and editor at <a href="http://nytimes.com">The New York Times</a>.

Tag Archive for 'education'

Ken­ny has applied a busi­ness man­age­ment style to run­ning her schools, focus­ing on attract­ing smart teach­ers, nur­tur­ing tal­ent, using reams of data to improve per­for­mance, and putting a huge empha­sis on reward­ing results.

In six years, Kenny’s vision has grown into a trio of char­ter schools under the rubric of Vil­lage Acad­e­mies, locat­ed in New York precincts where a mus­cu­lar pover­ty has thrived for gen­er­a­tions. The num­bers alone tell a com­pelling sto­ry. Local­ly, pass­ing rates for sev­enth-grade math hov­er around 30 per­cent. At HVA, the rate is a stun­ning 96 per­cent.

At least the ladies look good – Matt and I have taken better pictures.

In High School, I was always jeal­ous of oth­er kids who knew exact­ly what they want­ed to do with their life – it took me until half-way through col­lege before I real­ly found my call­ing, which explains my lib­er­al arts degree.

So, I’m amazed that there is a Design High School in the Low­er East Side. It has a pret­ty inter­est­ing mis­sion:

We believe that when stu­dents are engaged in the process of design­ing, they are learn­ing to observe, seek prob­lems, iden­ti­fy needs, frame prob­lems, work col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly, explore and appre­ci­ate solu­tions, weigh alter­na­tives, and com­mu­ni­cate their ideas ver­bal­ly, graph­i­cal­ly and phys­i­cal­ly.

And they even invit­ed artists, stu­dents, and staff to cre­ate stree­tart on the roof of the school. Here is a video, from Rock­et­boom:

Lisa and I still keep in touch with a lot of friends from high school, some of which we’ve known since grade school. We were all try­ing to remem­ber today if there was an alma mater anthem for our High School. As none of us were par­tic­u­lar­ly rah-rah back then, we couldn’t remem­ber.

Three of us, how­ev­er, could remem­ber the words to our grade school anthem — which is a bit shock­ing, con­sid­er­ing the last time I heard it was some­time in 1988, in the fifth grade. I think they forced us to sing this thing dur­ing assem­blies, through­out the school years:

Coun­try Park­way is our school,
where we learn to obey the rules.
We do our best and take great pride,
with our Country’s flag fly­ing high.

Here we work and here we play
Learn­ing new things every­day.
From north to south and east to west,
Our Coun­try Park­way is the best.

Creepy, in its empha­sis on con­for­mi­ty — espe­cial­ly for a fair­ly pro­gres­sive pub­lic school dis­trict.